Melissa Anderson Has New NIH Funding

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently funded Melissa Anderson’s R21, Sign Here: How to Conduct Informed Consent with Deaf Individuals. The U.S. Deaf community – a minority group of more than 500,000 people who use American Sign Language (ASL) – is one of the most understudied and underserved populations within our nation’s healthcare system. Reasons for this underrepresentation include lack of language access and feelings of mistrust toward the medical community. In this study Dr. Anderson and her team will refine and test two training interventions – one for healthcare providers and one for clinical researchers – that teach professionals how to interact with Deaf individuals skillfully and sensitively, especially during the informed consent process. Results will inform a large national study that will test the effectiveness of our training interventions in real-world academic and clinical settings with a range of available training resources. The intervention that will be tested and adapted was designed through a two-year collaboration between UMass Chan Medical School (UMMS) and the local Deaf community – community forums, focus groups, and an intervention development team inclusive of Deaf researchers, filmmakers, and laypeople. The resulting prototype intervention is a 30-minute training film titled Sign Here: How to Conduct Informed Consent with Deaf Research Participants. Learn more about Melissa Anderson’s work on our website.